Posts Tagged ‘job search’

What is your problem? It may not matter. R3H1 may be the one answer that directly solves about 98% of what is bugging you, getting in your way, and keeping you stressed.

R3H1 is my code for Rules, Routines, Rituals and Habits.

Arising from the science of project management, R3H1 gets you focused on working out the ideal process to overcome or complete something – anything. Then you simply follow through on the process steps you set out, rather than stressing about reaching the ideal goal.

Anytime you can substitute work for worry: you know you have a winning strategy.

Worrying is “illegitimate suffering,” per psychologist CG Jung and many others since Jung first studied neurosis.

Worrying keeps you circling a problem, but weirdly it also stops you from solving it. You simply cannot worry your way out of bad circumstances, unless you want to fall into victimhood and expect the charity of others – emotional or otherwise – to bail you out.

We all have the friend or co-worker who seems overwhelmed almost all the time. Each OMG episode somehow comes to a bumpy end and delivers relief, if not the ideal result. This is the person without a process who hosts a dinner party but doesn’t remember to get enough chairs to seat everyone. This is the friend who enrolled in a college course but can’t write or edit a term paper.

It’s you when you think you are crushing on someone and then you realize you hardly know the person. So you and all your friends must be consumed with worry about what your prospective romantic partner means by not texting, texting daily, or texting on a weekend but not asking you out.

Imagine if you had a process to follow that cut through all this suffering. Imagine how much you would enjoy a sense of accomplishment, plus the freedom and creativity you yearn to enjoy. Imagine if all the rules, routines, rituals and habits were ones you choose consciously, experiment with, and settle on.

Work, love, relationships, dinner parties, deadlines, big projects, and new job searches: anything becomes easier when you set up a process and follow it.

That is the greatest value of R3H1 to me. It is the source of confidence I have. Living with the rules, routines, rituals and habits I created for myself, leaves me with time to think, reflect, have fun, develop new ideas and love.

Love? Why would a personal brand need R3H1 to get the time and space to love? Isn’t it a basic human emotion? Yes. It’s just that getting time to act with love, engage with love and revel in love only occurs when there is time available to do it. I have to put a lot of my life into R3H1, so I can save my brain for big things and that includes relationships.

Do this. Whatever your problem is, document your current process in dealing with it. Consciously follow your process steps for a week. At the end of each day rate the results. How do you feel? What do you do right? What could you refine? What needs to change completely? Is there something that could give you a better arc toward your end goal?

Much like a food diary, a process diary gives you an objective look at your life. It’s private unless you are open to dialogue about it. You can select someone you trust – a partner, great friend or coach to help you talk through what steps you are taking – and which ones might bear changing.

For example, a client of mine made these three rules for leaving the house. “I make the bed, defrost the dog food, and get to work a half hour before I’m due for a meeting.” Her meetings became hugely successful because she felt confident. She felt mastery over her mornings, often the most chaotic part of our day.

So, if you are seeking a promotion, battling with a co-worker, going after a new career or building a business: consider each goal as an opportunity to document your process, review it, change it and get a bigger, better result in your life and work.

Disneyland may be the happiest place on earth, but the Disney store is not. The miserable experience of that retail environment at Santa Monica Promenade in California is remarkable for its consistently angry retail clerks and harsh restrictions on purchase. Nothing about the Disney brand gets you ready for it.

As a business owner and now the Global Marketing Director of a luxury cosmetics brand, I am ALWAYS looking for great people to hire at all levels. My favorite way to find a new employee is to get great service at a store or restaurant, and then invite that magical person for a “second interview.”

No, I don’t tell people I am interviewing them when we first meet in the retail setting. I don’t talk about the jobs I have open – and neither do the thousands of employers who use exactly the same technique as I do. We simply look for happy, proactive and engaging people, and then watch them solve problems or just do their job with a can-do attitude.

You are a candidate in an invisible job interview like that several times a week. It might happen on a phone call you make, one you take, or just doing your survival job while you wait for something better.

Within three feet of you is probably every opportunity you ever need, no matter what level of experience, education and interest you have. After all, 85% of why we make a hire is related to personal traits, and only 15% is actual skill. Most skills can be earned on-the-job or during a quick course of study.

We are hiring attitude.

We are hiring good people.

You’ve got to ask: what are we getting when we have the opportunity to interact with you when you aren’t doing active job seeking.

It’s like candid camera. Most employers are silently watching for great service and a positive attitude. It’s the way 75% of my clients and referring network have actually brought on a new employee.

At the Disney store on Sunday, I attempted to buy some Star Wars toys and it was an epic battle. Five employees roamed the store, assiduously avoiding eye contact with consumers who were also roaming the store. It wasn’t near closing time. It wasn’t packed. It was just ridiculous.

There was no one to check stock (because they were too busy looking at the floor and chatting with each other). One clerk I finally found actually said, “I cannot be bothered with this right now.” Checkout was so difficult with a scowling cashier who counted my Star Wars toys like a TSA employee checking my carry-on.

I was so relieved to leave with my purchases – including a bag I paid for at the counter, so I did not look like I was looting the store when I finally made it out the door. Apparently, the cashier would not or could not dispense a free bag to go with two toys that cost about 25 cents to make/ship/stock and retailed for about $25 each. If Disney retail is going for The Nightmare Before Christmas, they have met their corporate objective.

Don’t let an opportunity for an invisible job interview find you goofing off, angrily ringing up purchases or in any way being rude when you should be helping. You never know who’s watching, and what career lottery you may win.

Having coached the full range of job seekers, from entry-level candidates to C-suite executives, I learned the one job interview tactic that makes the difference between success and failure. This same tactic works for coaches and consultants who want to build a larger practice, secure more clients and do it more quickly.

The true genius of this tactic comes from Anthony Parinello, the author of the best-selling book Selling to VITO: The Very Important Top Officer. Tony has written about this technique as the foundation of successful selling to executives at the top of their organizations. If you don’t know Tony’s work, go to https://www.vitoselling.com – and grab the free download and enjoy meeting this world-class sales trainer.

There’s a profound similarity between selling to CEOs and interviewing for a job. The same fundamental truth is key for building your professional practice. The common thread between selling and interviewing is this.

Who you think YOU ARE is the key to success (or failure).

Success is not in the hands of the person with whom you are speaking, nor is it in the product, service or skill set you believe you represent.

Per the Carnegie Institute of Technology, 85% of the decision to hire you is based on your personal traits. Only 15% of the decision is based on your skills, experience or proof that what you do is better than other people who are competing for the position.

How does the interview or potential client learn about or experience your personal traits? Largely through how they see you relate to yourself.

Self-respect, self-worth and a self-positive attitude are what you must convey in an interview. Why?

Your attitude about yourself is like a cold. It’s contagious.

If you believe you that you are lucky to have the interview, you are likely to lose the job or the deal. If you believe the recruiter, hiring manager or prospective client is lucky to have the interview: you are likely to lose the job or the deal.

If you see the interview as a meeting of two people with equal business stature – you are going to succeed.

Of course this does not mean that you can do the same work as your interviewer or prospect. Why would they need you to do that?

Equal business stature simply means you share the same profound interest in successfully accomplishing the goals of the job. It means you are someone who is bringing a solution-oriented mindset, resourcefulness, ingenuity, and commitment.

See the next interview you have as an exchange of like-minded people, equally interested in addressing the challenges of the position that needs to be filled. Don’t court, cajole, or toady; don’t undersell or overpromise.

Show up ready to engage in a business conversation, where your focus is on the problems that need to be solved – not simply on what you have or haven’t done in the past.

Before you talk to a recruiter or hiring manager, ask yourself: “Am I from another planet?” Because you might be, when it comes to expectations, environment, hierarchy, and all sorts of corporate culture.

The number one reason why most people lose out on bigger salaries, plus a moving allowance, expense account and even a down payment on a house is?

You don’t know to ask for it.

If the “planet” you’re from has a culture that includes “don’t ask for more than we think you deserve,” you are leaving money, benefits, and perquisites on the table.

Your current planet might be a business where you are working, or it might be your family culture, where you never understood how much money came in and where it all went.

If you are a second child, your “family planet” has really compromised your asking ability.

After all, your eldest sibling had the “first mover advantage.”

A second child’s life is lived like you’re behind Microsoft, Apple, Oakley, Iron Man and Henry Ford’s Model T. The eldest child naturally has a winner take all mentality.

If you fall anywhere behind the eldest, you got trickle down everything. Clothes, bedroom furniture, books, music, computer, video game console and pie (or whatever dessert was left over after numero uno was full). Stuff just trickled down on little lucky you.

Of course, your life might not have been that harsh. And, you might be the eldest or only child (like the great majority of US astronauts and presidents).

If you are the eldest, you got treated either too well or too harshly.

The parental units either doted on you or cut their teeth on you.

If you’re an only child, you have been on your own planet for too long. You might lack empathy, patience and agreeableness. That makes you a great mergers and acquisitions executive, but a difficult employee all the way up the ladder to that post.

The truth is: no one has it easy interviewing at a new company. It’s a new planet. You don’t know what to expect. It’s hard to get ready for the unknown.

I worked at seven major media companies and Global 2000 corporations. Each one was a planet onto itself. Some had less gravity, thinner air, and way better perqs. Some had more gravity, thicker air and way less of everything else.

When I became a consultant, I realized that I was on a different planet with every phone call, meeting and strategy session. The ability to recognize that old rules do not apply, is imperative to your success. The ability to read the landscape and the people on it is mission critical.

My advice to you is “stay in the moment,” when you are in conversations with people you do not yet know.

Do not go forward with your old mindset.

You cannot imagine what is so much better and how to get it – if you persist in believing that you know how it is everywhere. And, you won’t know what to avoid, if you’re coming from a happy place and into a darker one.

A basic rule: ask for more than you think you deserve. Ask for a moving allowance. Ask for car service. Ask for a down payment on a house. And, if you think the company’s going to go places, get stock.

If you are in any type of transition regarding work or life, or you are considering a transition, then you may have thought about getting someone to coach you through the process. For example, you may be seeking a new direction for your future because it’s clear what you’ve been doing isn’t working any longer. Alternatively, you might know exactly what you want to do; but you can’t see how to bridge your past experience with your aspirations for a new career.

These are reasonable times to consider getting yourself some coaching, especially if you have friends or loved ones who are more than willing to give you their opinions of what you should do.

Friends and loved ones are the most dangerous part of making a change.

There’s a bundle of reasons, and here are some. Friends don’t like to see friends change. After all, you are friends because of who you are now, not who you could become. Loved ones have a stake in who you are now, including how you earn a paycheck, the days of the week you have free time to spend with them, and the chores you do to keep a household or relationship humming.

Most of my coaching clients delay their decision to get coached, about 6 to 36 months past when they should have reached out. Why? They rely on friends and loved ones for advice! The very people who have a stake in your remaining in your present form, doing the job you do, the way you do it, and not adding any further burden of either greater status or dependency on them.

Even knowing this, most people “crowdsource” the most important decisions in their lives. Recently, a client came to me because she was standing at a school with other young moms. They weren’t even people she knew well, just other parents who shared carpool, cupcake making and fundraising with each other. Their only connection was their kids attendance at the school, which of course means the birthday parties, T-ball and cascade of events that bring families together under the circumstances.

“The other moms asked me what I do,” Sarah reported to me. “So, I figured I better do something, since everyone was an attorney, business owner, or had some occupation. Turns out I was the only mom who had taken some time off.”

Peer pressure doesn’t stop when you graduate high school. These largely anonymous people had crowdsourced Sarah out of her decision to stay home. She’d made the decision to help her family stabilize while their first child entered school and her husband took a job that required him to travel.

Whether or not Sarah was ready to return to work, is a personal and financial question. Yet, like most people, she was polling strangers – or at least accepting their vote – about her life.

That’s a moment for coaching. Sarah had met me at a 2-day seminar I gave on personal branding, and she reached out to get a one-on-one session. In 90 minutes we solved her problem, got an action plan together, and set her on making decisions that were truly relevant to her situation. She’ll check back with me for a progress report in eight weeks.

So, when is the right time for coaching? Whenever you find yourself polling others about your life choices, whenever you fear the criticism or lack of support from friends or loved ones, and whenever you need clear answers to questions that confound you.

I know. I’ve been coached on every significant life change I’ve ever made. It’s part of my success equation. Should it be part of yours?

Do you have a question you want to ask a coach? Email it to me at [email protected]. Subject line: Question. I will write back to you, with some insight to move you forward.

The terrible truth of work is that almost anyone can do anything. I don’t want to make you paranoid, but open up the UCLA Extension course catalog, a MOOC or watch a few “how-to” YouTube videos, and you get my drift. Education and skills are the easiest things to acquire.

Leaving out advanced neurosurgery, the super-tasking executive producer of major live sports events on television, and maybe engineering stem cell regeneration of body parts: it doesn’t take long to come up to speed on most job requirements. That’s why this quote from Carnegie Institute of Technology rings so true:

85% of your financial success is due to your personal traits and ability to communicate, negotiate and lead. Shockingly, only 15% is due to technical ability.

When you consider how you are spending your time in preparation for a career or the advancement of your career, do your priorities make sense?

It may occur to you that you know less about your excellent personal traits than you know how to use Excel. You probably have spent more time setting margins of documents and unjamming your printer than you have working on the type of traits that actually matter to success.

You never regret a day of education; it’s simply the type of education that I am cautioning you about. Communication, negotiation and leadership flow from personal intelligence, which is the ability to self-regulate. That is, manage yourself and manage your interactions with others.

Part of self-management is gaining or polishing the one-of-a-kind traits you possess, so you can express them to the people around you. Of course, that is largely what personal branding is, although there’s a bit more to it.

Visibility and promotions largely come from being more of yourself, or as I said to Claire my teaching assistant: get bigger. You be you, just be more of the best of yourself. Become formidable, a force, and a monument to what your most valuable traits are. She is an elegant and intelligent person with a sharp wit, on her way to becoming a commander-in-charge.

That is the extraordinary magnitude of expression that you must exert for us to see you and respect you; then feel compelled to ask you to ascend over others in an area of your expertise, function, or team. That outsized version of yourself is what puts our trust into you. That’s how you create a positive reputation, really an uproar about how valuable you are to our organization.

If you know nothing else about yourself, consider that anyone can be a force of innovative ideas. Innovation is a process, more than it is an ability or knack. It takes external stimuli, which isn’t hard to get given the world at your fingertips via the web. Harvard Business Review recently added its seven ways to innovate, and any one of them will set you apart from your co-workers or other job candidates.

Look for differences. Before you interview or attend a meeting, contrast what a competitor’s product does that is remarkably different from the company’s offering.

Trend spot. Look at Instagram or Pinterest and see what colors, images, words, attitudes and photos are beginning to dominate the consciousness of the people who matter.

Assess angry words. Read the hashtags, comments, and blogs for what is going wrong. In every problem of reasonable size, there are great opportunities.

Question everything. Most businesses are way past the NIH (not-invented-here) mentality, and are actively seeking ways to modify the way people work, the way products are developed or distributed and the way messages are crafted.

Look at the deviants. There are always “outliers,” as Malcolm Gladwell calls the fringe elements. What workarounds, avoidance behavior or personalized adjustments are people making?

Go away. Take a field trip or informational interview to a place that does nothing like anything you are familiar with. The natural history museum, planetarium, or Bloomingdales can refresh your brain and ignite your creativity.

See what’s working in other industries. Are hardware companies selling spare parts with new machines, so there can be on-the-spot repairs? Is deflating a football by the weight of a paperclip the key to winning the big game? How can you apply that in your field?

If you have not a thing to offer that is so much more magnificent than other candidates or competitors: these are seven ways to use your brain in a novel way. Think new. Think innovation. Think for yourself.

As a career coach and business communications expert, I often surprise people by knowing something about them that they have never told me – and maybe never told anyone else. I am not psychic. I am empathetic.

When I ask you a question, and your brain re-routes it to give me an unrelated answer: I know you’ve got a lot on your mind, and lots of it is sad, frustrated and filled with regrets. Sometimes your answers – and even your questions – are touched by bitterness, jealousy and fear.

I know this, and so do most people around you. The difference between them and me is simple. My job is to help you find your authentic self, and then help you represent yourself. By that I mean, structuring a way for you to show us the real you, the person we want to hire, fund or choose as our business consultant or favorite company to patronize.

I help you find your inner wisdom, self-acceptance, and clear-eyed optimism.

My job is to tell you how you are coming across. Then, help you make the genuine transition to the person who stops losing, who stops failing, and who is never again less than your potential or desire. In other words, I help you get what you want, what you really, really want.

Nothing I do is magic. I don’t do hypnosis. I have a process that helps you unsheathe your truth, your power and your future. That means, I have to listen for the pain, and sometimes the confusion that has created a fractured self-image, rotting career, failing business or stunted ambition.

What’s going wrong today for you at work or even in your life, flows from what I call your “ocean of negativity.” That’s the toxic soup of criticism, lack of validation and neglect that’s been brewing since childhood.

My work is showing you how to be what I call “self-positive.” How to find your valuable, shiny self that’s been tarnished, simply by being overlooked. And match your really wonderful qualities with authentic opportunities for your business or career.

I’m putting together a distance-learning course, so you’ll have more access to this process as soon as I can get it completed. If you want to know when the course is ready, just email me at [email protected]. Subject line: Authentic.

In the meantime, here are some questions to get you started cleaning up that ocean of negativity. If you send me your answers to a few questions – the ones that mean the most to you: I’ll be sure to keep them in confidence, and get back to you with a personal message.

What is it so hard to believe you should be the best you can be, and work for someone else? Why do so few people genuinely want to be employees? Why is it impossible to believe you can be a person with great self-worth who also respects the opportunity to work?

Apparently, most Millennials believe that going to the office looks like The Office, the television show that makes working for someone else look ridiculous. I thought The Office was a really good comedy, with high quality writing and amazing actors. The show used an office setting much like I Love Lucy used marriage. The relationship problems made us laugh, primarily because marriage seemed like a bunch of pranks that husbands and wives played on each other.

In New York magazine, Richard Greenwald, a labor scholar at Brooklyn College, “says he’ s struck by how many of his students chafe at the notion of traditional office jobs.”

How could that be? How could a generation of educated people come to think that working for an organization is ridiculous? How could earning a living cause “chafing?”

As an educator, I wonder what curriculum we are teaching that would make working for Unilever, Zara, Nestle, Coke, Apple, Google, and so on, look ridiculous. Have we somehow run down the reputation of organizations? Have we diminished the idea that you are lucky when you are chosen for an opportunity in a business that someone else has built?

I am most concerned that abject disrespect that has become a meme. I’m also concerned that watching a comedy show would actually convince anyone that it’s depicting real life.

My daughter has a cat. We never mistake him for Grumpy Cat on YouTube. We don’t think that Esther the Wonder Pig is the average pig.

Where is the genesis of the respect problem? As an employer and a career coach, I see exactly what Greenwald is purporting. There are a lot of people who treat working like it’s a joke. Bosses have to prod, push, demand, become vexed and bent out of shape in order for work to get done. They have to have a cruise ship mentality – making sure there are plenty of snacks, fun activities and a morale officer, formerly known as a human resources director. In between all that, some small amount of work needs to be accomplished.

I’m sorry to seem like the Grinch right now. I know you are just kicking off your year. You hopefully have grand plans for your personal brand as well as your career. I want you to have all that – and more.

So here’s a hot tip. If you want to be a real stand out, it’s pretty easy. Bring your respect for the organization, proof that you take work seriously, and have your high jinx on your own time.

This has been a public service announcement on behalf of employers everywhere.